Before Night Falls: A Memoir

Arenas, Reinaldo

ISBN 10: 0140157654 / ISBN 13: 9780140157659

Published by Penguin Publishing Group, 1994

Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00092087221

Synopsis:

This is the shocking memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, giving an account of his life as a writer and a homosexual and his struggle for freedom of expression. He describes his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, his suppression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, and his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift. He never really reconciled himself to life in America away from the beloved country of his birth, and committed suicide in 1990 at the age of 47, already dying from Aids.

About the Author: Reinaldo Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943. In the 1970s, he was imprisoned multiple times for being gay, which clashed with the beliefs of the Communist regime. Despite the hardships imposed during his imprisonment, Arenas produced a significant body of work, including his Pentagonia, a set of five novels written between the 1960s and 1980s that comprise a "secret history" of post-revolutionary Cuba: Singing from the Well, Farewell to the Sea, Palace of the White Skunks, Color of Summer, and The Assault. In 1980, he was one of 120,000 Cubans who arrived in the United States on the Mariel boatlift. Arenas, ill with AIDS, committed suicide in 1990 shortly after completing Before Night Falls. 

Bibliographic Details

Title: Before Night Falls: A Memoir
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Very Good